


pas de deux

by amiesce



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Bisexual Bella Swan, Divorce, F/F, F/M, Infidelity (implied), Mild Graphic Violence, Minor Character Death, On-Again/Off-Again Relationship, Open Relationships, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:02:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27495409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amiesce/pseuds/amiesce
Summary: After two bad years of marriage, Bella wants out. She wants to see the world, fall in love with other people, and make her own decisions. And if she has sex with Edward in every city they meet, then it won't be the worst decision she's ever made.//Bella fucks strangers in the dim, smoky clubs, gravitating toward the ones who possess that brief, near-illusory lapse between smile and intent. The dangerous ones. Men and women, she crushes them between her powerful thighs, but she’s careful not to hurt them too much. They make her teeth ache, and she gets why Edward was always holding back. She manages to not kill any of them.
Relationships: Bella Swan/Original Female Character(s), Edward Cullen/Bella Swan
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	pas de deux

**Author's Note:**

> No one asked for this stupid twilight fanfic but here it is.
> 
> EDIT: updated tags, made some changes to the second-to-last scene after noticing a continuity error.

Two years into their marriage and her life as a vampire, Bella asks for a divorce. She refuses to be guilted out of it with appeals to Renesmee’s mental and emotional wellbeing. Their daughter will only be further traumatized if she has to witness her parents constantly fighting. Besides, even if Renesmee looks like a teenager, her mind has already moved well beyond that tender and rebellious stage.

“Why?” Edward asks, and she ignores the way his voice and his heart breaks as she throws clothes into a suitcase in their bedroom.

Edward understands nothing. And rather than try to understand, he always has to take the easiest way out. Demand that she lift her mental shield so that he can hear what she’s thinking. Before Bella, Edward could effortlessly divine what people wanted. A century spent peering into the minds of ex-girlfriends and meeting their every need, resolving arguments before they festered, never resorting to ask the question, “Are you mad at me?” 

They argue when Bella refuses to tell him where she is going. 

“You'll never understand me!” she screams, not for the first time, and accompanies this invective by flashing way too much fang.

They agree on a separation for now, and the next day Bella is on a plane to Paris.

Everyone back home will probably have something to say about Bella being a horrible mother. Never mind that Bella has never felt like a mother. She’s always felt more like one of many interchangeable babysitters for a strange child who grows stranger to Bella with every accelerated year she ages. At the same time, Bella watches her parents grow older, gradually and unstoppably.

* * *

Being a young, pretty 18 year-old abroad has currency in the world. It means that someone always wants to help hold her bags or treats her like some dumb college girl paying for her vacation with her daddy’s credit card.

She’s out of the woods, and animal prey is much more difficult to come by. The transition to hunting humans is so easy, she feels betrayed. When something is forbidden and vilified, it’s no surprise the taste of it gushes in your mouth. But the urban vampires Bella meets show her how to do it gently. And, when she finally feels safe, how to do it ungently.

Bella fucks strangers in the dim, smoky clubs, gravitating toward the ones who possess that brief, near-illusory lapse between smile and intent. The dangerous ones. Men and women, she crushes them between her powerful thighs, but she’s careful not to hurt them too much. They make her teeth ache, and she gets why Edward was always holding back. She manages to not kill any of them.

* * *

The next time they see each other is in Budapest. He just so happens to bump into her at the Hungarian National Gallery. They catch an opera show, and then Bella takes him back to her hotel to make rough, property-destroying love from sunup to sundown. She will have a difficult time explaining things to the concierge when she checks out of her room the next day.

“Are you coming home?” Edward asks, laying his hand gently on the dip of her youthful waist.

“I don’t know,” she answers.

His fingers trail up her ribs. “I miss you.”

“Yeah.”

“If you don’t want to go back, then we can stay here. Whatever you want. I promise we can make it work.”

Bella rolls away from him onto her stomach. He follows, bending to kiss the ridges of her spine.

“Bella,” he begs against her shoulder blade.

“Don’t,” she says, and shoves Edward off the bed and onto the floor, where they are a tangle of limbs and hair, like snakes writhing in a pit of their own making.

* * *

They keep meeting and they keep fucking, even though she knows it’s a terrible idea.

“How many?”

Bella snorts. “Really, Edward?”

He sinks his teeth into the soft inside of her thigh until she twitches, then laps up the black blood that trails down her skin. “Just answer the question.”

“It’s not like I keep count.”

“That many, huh?” The way he moves his tongue against her, she can tell he’s had some practice too.

Bella’s hand winds through his hair, forming a loose fist. “Maybe 70.”

“In six months? God, Bella.”

She yanks his head back and stares him down. “How many for you?”

“We’re still married, you know.”

“Come on.”

He wets his lips. “One.”

She shoves his face back down, and Edward makes her cum with his mouth before she rides him so hard he cries.

“Why are we doing this?” she asks quietly, her fingers tracing his collarbone as they lie next to each other on the floor.

Edward’s eyes are closed. “You know I love you.”

“That’s not an answer.”

His eyes open and he turns his face toward her. “Do you love me?”

“Why does it matter?”

“There’s your answer,” he says, and turns away again.

When they part ways at the train station in Barcelona, he slides his hands up her spine and kisses her like he knows her. In some ways he still does.

* * *

Her name is Ayame. She is short and delicate and smells like bergamot and lemon. She smokes and rides a motorcycle and her long hair catches the wind like the mane of a warhorse. Bella is besotted the moment their eyes meet in the fluorescent-lit convenience store aisle.

Ayame teaches Bella Japanese and Buddhism and how to tongue a woman’s clit and make her scream.

When the accident happens, Bella slips in the blood that pools from Ayame’s disarrayed limbs, and her stomach turns over even as her mouth fills with saliva. She realizes just what Edward means when he says he’s a monster. 

By the time the paramedics come to pry Ayame’s limp, beautiful body from the wreckage of her motorcycle, Bella is long gone. She’s shaking as she scrubs her skin in the shower, digging her fangs into her lip so that she won’t lick the gore off her fingers. 

* * *

Bella is alone in Saint Petersburg, studying under the world-renowned masters at the Petersburg School of Ballet. Thanks to her vampire’s beauty and grace, Bella easily wins over the doubtful masters. Convincing them to take in and train an 18 year-old American is the least of her supernatural abilities.

She shines in the studio but is shy of the stage. Bella turns down the visiting artistic directors who wish to crown her _prima ballerina_ of their companies. She must avoid notoriety, since she'll be keeping her face for the rest of eternity.

Saint Petersburg has an average of 165 overcast days per year. Bella spends most of her time alone, either listening to records in her sumptuous private apartment or walking at night through the brilliantly lit streets of the city. She understands better now why vampires stay in covens. It’s a lonely existence otherwise. For the moment, however, she relishes the solitude. It gives her time to think things over. 

Renesmee stopped aging a year ago, if the pictures on the Christmas card are anything to go by. She and Jacob beam out through a border of poinsettias. Jake is climbing steadily to the build of a 20-21 year old, while Nessie is frozen at the lovely age of 22, with full breasts and womanly features. 

Bella will be forever stuck at 18 with her small chest and razorblade wrists. This year, Bella would have turned 26, and now her own daughter looks like her older, prettier sister. 

* * *

He calls her one night, voice cracking over the bad line. He sounds frightened, distant. 

“I wish it would all just end.”

Now is not the time to call him out on his propensity to use self-destruction as a means of exercising control over her. She stays on the line with him, soothing him into the night. 

“I want to come see you,” Edward murmurs. 

She gives him the address to her St. Petersburg apartment, already regretting it. 

He shows up after two days and within two hours is pulling her dress off her shoulders and making her late for ballet practice. He’s delighted with her tiny costumes, the ribbon shoes, the handwritten letter from a Monsieur X inviting her to dance in Paris. 

“But you’d be amazing,” he murmurs against the sharp ridge of her shoulder bone, while she sits on the edge of the bed and talks to Madam on the phone, explaining the sudden family emergency that will prevent her from attending practice tonight. 

She shoves him away and reappears in the bathroom. “I thought vampires didn’t do the whole publicity thing.”

Edward frowns as he lounges between the rumpled bed sheets. He’s an expert lounger. 

“As long you stop after five years or so, you’re fine. You’d be surprised how quickly people can forget a face. Especially when you have stage makeup on.”

Bella pauses in the act of scrubbing the smeared lipstick off her mouth. “Are you speaking from experience?”

He rolls his head back and stares up at the ceiling. Nonanswer.

They keep so many secrets from each other. Even when they don’t have to.

* * *

When Charlie’s cancer relapses she goes home, helps her father’s girlfriend around the house. Charlie was supposed to destroy her high school photos but of course he didn’t. Bella takes the photo albums and burns them in the backyard.

Her red eyes should have forbidden the visit, but Jake and Nessie would never set the wolf pack on her. Jake, especially, seems to think he can fix the relationship between his in-laws. Bella wonders if he finds it all ironic, playing marriage counselor with her of all people. Bella turns down the invitations to visit La Push and spends most of her time in Charlie’s room. No need for sleep. Once every week or so, she slips out to the woods to hunt.

After the funeral, Bella packs up and goes to Rome.

* * *

“I remember coming here to die,” Edward says, and she feels the words vibrate in his throat. They are relaxing in the tub, her spine against his chest. It is the most relaxed she’s felt around him in a long time.

The divorce papers are signed and sealed on the coffee table outside. A bellhop was their witness. Apparently Tanya insisted on it, and Bella should be grateful. But it’s a stab to her pride, knowing he would do this for Tanya but not for _her_.

She drags her fingers through the still bathwater, draws a line up Edward’s thigh toward his knee. “Do you still want to?”

“Sometimes.”

Bella turns her face toward the window, where the slanting light strikes her cheeks and makes them glitter. “Does she know?”

“About us?”

“About _you_ .” _You and your stupid death wish._

“Yes.”

He doesn’t elaborate. His mind has always been impenetrable to her. She guides his fingers to her clit, and the smooth surface of the water betrays the smallest ripple of her body’s response.

* * *

It’s years later when she sees him again. She’s sitting at a table in a little cafe in Budapest, reading a book. She looks up and there he is. Her mouth fills with saliva and it’s an unfamiliar feeling.

“You haven’t aged a day,” he says.

Bella scoffs and Edward smiles with that crooked, boyish mouth.

“May I sit?”

She nods and he takes the seat across from her, propping his elbows on the table.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“Tanya is visiting Irina’s grave.” He pauses, eyelids lowered as he looks at her. “I just came from the National Gallery.”

“Looking for me?” she wants to ask, and doesn’t. 

But she tells him instead she’s met someone, a human who smokes and rides a motorcycle and refuses to let Bella turn her. Edward is happy for her, of course, but there’s a catch in his eyes that she can’t help but notice. It’s the same catch in her own throat, after all.

She’s drinking him in, and doesn’t want to stop.

He's almost shy when he invites her back to his hotel, and she bites her lip like a schoolgirl before accepting.

"Tanya won't mind?" Bella has to confirm. She doesn't know what those two are, even after all this time.

She sees immediately that it hasn't occurred to him. But she's no stranger to stupid behavior when it comes to Edward.

He presses his tongue to the usual places that make her shiver, and she shivers. He fucks her from behind, pinning her wrists to the bed. He’s gotten much, much better at fucking. 

Her orgasm bursts like flashbulbs behind her eyes and she reaches for him blindly. She knows this will be the last time, and that they will both be happier for it. Still, her body is already mourning his loss.

* * *

Bella comes home and rouses her sleeping girlfriend in order to fuck her desperately into the sheets of their shared bed. Edward’s scent still clings to Bella’s skin.

“Part of me will always want him,” Bella admits afterward.

The girl breathes out her smoke. “Love him, you mean.”

“I love _you_.”

Bella’s gaze must look wounded, because the girl stubs out her cigarette and reaches for her. Bella nestles against her chest, comforted by the sound of blood moving in the girl’s veins.

“He was yours for so long. That’s all I meant by it.”

The girl tips Bella’s face upward, kisses her with a fierceness that reminds Bella that the girl gets jealous too, sometimes.

“I bet you fuck like him,” she whispers hoarsely against Bella’s stunned mouth, and Bella does. Bella rolls their bodies, pinning the girl to the bed, and fucks her the way Edward fucked her. The way Ayame did. She memorizes the look of ecstasy on the girl’s face as she cums, wishing this moment will never end, knowing that all the best things do.


End file.
